Maze encounters

Counters and Triggers

The encounter triggering works with a counter. A number is generated randomly, then for each step taken that number is decremented. When It reaches 0, and encounter occurs. The decrementation and randomly generated value is relative to the difficulty settings of the game. The number of open sides also influence the decrementation of the counter.

The counter starts at 200, it decrements according to the difficulty and the nb of sides:

Counter decrementation

Difficulty

base

Per open side

Easy

1

0.25

Medium

2

0.5

Hard

4

1

Note: Fractions are not substrated. So at easy, all 4 walls must be open to decrement by 1.

Doors

When a door is opened, an encounter check is made. The game rolls 1d100, if the value is higher than the counter, en encounter is triggered. This is why opponing doors can lead to a battle.

Encounters

Encounters are created from predefined sets of monsters. This is to make sure you'll never end up with a weird monster combination. So the adventure designer will define parties of monsters used for battle for each floor and each area. Then one of the monster will be selected randomly from the database that match those criterias. If there is no encounters for the specified floor and area, the game will skip battles until the player step in into an area or floor where there is an encounter.

The number 99 can be used to indicate that this encoutner will appear in any area or any floor. For example, if you say [floor=1, area=99] then what ever the area, the monster will show up on floor 1. While if you say [floor=99, area=1] then that encounter will appear in all floors or area 1.

Each encounters has a list of 8 monsters. The first 4 monsters are for the easy difficulty, the 2 followings, are for the normal difficulty and the 2 last are for the hard difficulty. This is why the max number of monsters will vary between 4 and 8.

Then each monster in the party has a probability to show up. The first monster always appear to make sure that all battles always have 1 monsters. If you have boss battles, the boss should be placed first to make sure it appears all the time. Then the odds for each monster to appear is determined by the type of probabilities defined in the encounter. Here are the possibilities for each of the 8 monsters:

Type of Monster probability distribution

Name

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

Random

100%

50%

50%

50%

50%

50%

50%

50%

Fixed

100%

100%

100%

100%

100%

100%

100%

100%

Decremental

100%

75%

50%

25%

75%

25%

75%

25%

Low

100%

25%

25%

25%

25%

25%

25%

25%

High

100%

75%

75%

75%

75%

75%

75%

75%

So for each monster from B to H, a percentage roll is made, if it's lower than the value above, the monster will be part of the battle. It also means that at easy mode only monsters A,B,C,D will show up. So if you want a monster to only show up on hard level, then you can place it as G or H and it will only appear on hard level.

Unidentification and monster groups

Each monsters is linked with an unidentified monsters. Those unidentified monsters serve as a group of monster sharing the same unidentified picture. When the monster is unidentified, that picture and the group name is shown instead of the original picture. I tried to make sure that each monster group has a large variety of creatures to make sure there is confusion in what the creature really is.

At the start of each combat round, A check is made for each monsters to see if the party identifies the creature. Each monster has a flat 25% chance of beign uncovered. For now the system is pretty simple and it does the job.